May I suggest a simple, left v. right distinction between people… voters?

The one group believes in a God of their own image: sitting on a throne; possessing those familiar human lordly passions of jealousy, judgment, vengeance, occasionally love… a lord who is directly involved in, even controlling, our lives.

The other group, contains a much larger spectrum. Beginning with people who firmly believe in God and her/his presence, but, who also appreciate God is beyond our human ability to grasp. As for knowing God’s mind… or plan, forget about it! Can a toddler hope to understand Einstein?

From there the spectrum of perspectives follows the whole gamut of wonder and curiosity about our creation and god… all the way to folks who are revolted by any notion of a god, heaven or hell. At the furthest end of this spectrum of humanity are folks who genuinely believe there’s only emptiness beyond this moment and find peace in that.

This is a politically important, if under appreciated, distinction with profound implications. Today, America is in the midst of a revolutionary struggle, driven by a seemingly unopposed ground swell of scared and passionate people who have been convinced they’re God’s personal agents, believing it their duty to takeover our government, then remake it in their heavenly inspired image.

Tea Partiers along with more and more Republicans are shunning rational dialogue. They seem to resent science, its rules and its fact-based findings, as witnesses by their twisting and tweaking, misrepresenting and ignoring all that doesn’t fit into their dogma driven messages, as exemplified by their AGWHoax campaign.

I bring this up because we have an election coming where it is sounding like most liberal minded voters just can’t get too excited and figure to heck with it, we’ll sit this one out. Just can’t work up the energy to get out and vote… You know who you are.

But, don’t you realize, it’s no good pretending those angry faith-based Tea Parties aren’t for real and dangerous? That old song keeps echoing in my mind: “America where are you now, don’t you care about your sons and daughters? Don’t you know, we need you now?”

Who’s going to defend our government, if you won’t? Who’s going to speak up for science, rational evaluation of information and willingness to learn new lessons? Who’s going to demand that our twenty-first century problems receive twenty-first century realism, instead of scapegoating?

Lets imagine for a moment… go back 10 years. There was that one day when, if only a few more liberal thinking people had gotten motivated enough to vote. We’d have had President Gore. The whole Iraq “war of choice” spawned horrors, costs would never have happened - heck - 9/11 probably wouldn’t have happened!

Why? Because Gore would have been listening to his national terrorist experts. Thus, the entire intelligence bureaucracy would have been paying attention. Thus, those incoming intelligence signals would have percolated, with the warnings they gave off being heeded and tracked down.

Instead, USA had a faith-based administration preoccupied with old grudges and with no interest in anyone else’s opinion. This Republican Administration ignored our nation’s qualified terrorist experts. Why? Because, Bush et al. had God on their side. See what that’s gotten us. A war that has only succeeded, over the endless years, to elevate the true enemy’s abilities to unimagined levels, plus introduce privatized corporate warriors into our US military. All this at a horrific cost in blood, materials, money, world authority plus goodwill, and homeland civility.

Even had the 9/11 atrocity happen. Gore would have focused on getting the real perpetrators - Bin Laden, his band and material supporters - not easy, for sure. But, with all USA’s energy focused on that goal, rather than a diversion, plus that worldwide goodwill USA possessed at the time, there could have been no other outcome. Imagine the lesson we would have taught the power-politics world.

Yet today, most Republicans remain incapable of even admitting they, we, did anything wrong, let alone that we actually have serious real world lessons to learn. They act as though this is how life was supposed to have played out. Becoming defensive at any voiced doubt.

OK, there’s no going back, but surely we liberal leaning folk should heed this hard lesson. We need to challenge handing over our government to folks who despise it. We can go ahead and scoff that Democrats suck in a hundred and one ways, but they’re all we got! On this one out of 730 days, the only day when your opinion actually matters, please be pragmatic - motivate and VOTE.

Please do your part and help in this struggle of rationality over dogma-driven, emotion fueled politics of self interest. And, bring a few family and friends along with you.

OK, there is no going back, but surely we, liberal leaning folk, should learn this hard lesson from history. We should be terrified of handing over our government to folks who despise it.

That is also the Republican slogan. Democrats hate America. Other then vested interests in personal ideology I see little difference in the two major parties. Doesn’t matter to me which gains power, I think America’s screwed.

OK, there is no going back, but surely we, liberal leaning folk, should learn this hard lesson from history. We should be terrified of handing over our government to folks who despise it.

That is also the Republican slogan. Democrats hate America. Other then vested interests in personal ideology I see little difference in the two major parties. Doesn’t matter to me which gains power, I think America’s screwed.

Well, yes we (humanity not just USA) are screwed.

Furthermore, nothing stupid the Democrats have ever done comes anywhere close to the insanity and damage the Bush administration inflicted upon our country and the world order.

And, nothing is scarier than folks who because God is on their side believe they can ignore most of what is really happening upon this planet and its over extended tribe of humanity.

Gnos,
I will admit I have not done a study of the Tea Party. I do know that when I surf through their websites, I’m appalled at the hatred infused ads and rants against anyone who doesn’t agree 100% with what they say. Perhaps what scares me most about them - I’ve noticed not one iota of self reflection in the lot.

Oh, the hypocrisy, it burns …
The Washington Post today has a profile of Mike Vanderboegh, the 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama who last week posted a call for people to throw bricks through the windows at Democratic offices around the country to protest their votes for Health Care Reform…

Hundreds of placard-waving Tea Party activists in Albuquerque weren’t sheepish Thursday about sharing ideas on where to trim government fat.

The rally along Menaul Boulevard between San Pedro and Wyoming was ostensibly to protest paying taxes to the federal government. But irresponsible government spending topped almost every list of concerns, and many activists brimmed with cost-saving ideas.

Eliminate the federal Department of Education.

Reduce foreign aid.

Starve the defense budget.

Cut back or phase out big domestic spending programs – specifically Medicaid (the government health insurance program for low-income Americans, a similar program for the elderly (Medicare), and Social Security.

“We are not our brothers’ keeper,” said Gabrielle Kotoski, a devotee of Ayn Rand, the author of Atlas Shrugged who is enjoying a renaissance of sorts among Tea Party types nearly 30 years after her death.

“If they say that I am their keeper then they are asserting that I am their slave,” said Kotoski, who handed out small booklets at Thursday’s rally containing essays from The Virtue of Selfishness, one of Rand’s books.

Kotoski receives Medicare benefits and admitted the seeming incongruity of benefiting from the program while suggesting that it be phased out, along with other large domestic programs.

“I hate that I’m on it,” she said of Medicare. She spoke of “our children, and our grandchildren,” and how they won’t be “enslaved by a government forcing them to take care of other people,” she added.

Despite the Tea Party’s seeming mantra about limiting government, a consensus on Kotoski’s idea was hard to find in the crowd, with other activists debating whether, and how deeply, to cut back government ‘entitlement’ programs.

Some, like Kotoski, supported scrapping Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, but said it was unfair to deny those individuals already receiving benefits from continuing to get them.

“You don’t want to cut benefits” for those receiving Social Security now, said Jeff Peterson of Albuquerque, who supported changing the rules in a decade or so to allow people to invest their own money to build a nest egg.

The radical right caught fire last year, as broad-based populist anger at political, demographic and economic changes in America ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the nation.

Hate groups stayed at record levels — almost 1,000 — despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America. Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%, adding some 136 new groups during 2009. And, most remarkably of all, so-called “Patriot” groups — militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose “one-world government” on liberty-loving Americans — came roaring back after years out of the limelight.

The anger seething across the American political landscape — over racial changes in the population, soaring public debt and the terrible economy, the bailouts of bankers and other elites, and an array of initiatives by the relatively liberal Obama Administration that are seen as “socialist” or even “fascist” — goes beyond the radical right. The “tea parties” and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism.

BY David Saltonstall - DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT
How conservative is he? The 47-year-old Paul - who trounced establishment candidate Trey Grayson in Kentucky’s GOP Senate primary Tuesday - wants to abolish the federal departments of education, commerce and energy, as well as the income tax.

Like Palin, with whom Paul now stands atop the Tea Party cake, he is opposed to all government bailouts and earmarks, and President Obama’s “socialist” health care law. He favors a constitutional amendment banning abortion, even in cases of rape and incest.

Senate candidate Ken Buck has denounced Social Security with the same fervor and much the same language as Freedomworks, the far-right outfit that pushed privatization during the Bush years and has sought to line up Tea Party activists behind the Republican establishment. Buck calls the program “a horrible policy” and wrongly claims that it will “bankrupt” the country sometime during the next two decades. “I don’t know that the federal government should be involved in a retirement plan,” Buck told a right-wing audience last spring, saying that the very idea of social insurance is “fundamentally against what I believe.”

The US has only been around for 200 years. I don’t expect it to last forever.

Maybe the Tea Party will start a revolution and we’ll end up with a more radical government. I don’t know what it is that strike a cord with these people however however I have no delusion that the US is immune to take over from radical idealists.

That’s what started the US in the first place.

The radicals always win because they have the passion that drives the masses. That’s my opinion anyway.

It’s not to say you should give up. You have to do as you think it is right to do.

Maybe Islamic extremists will take over and make me bow to Mecca 6 times a day. Maybe the right or left will take over or some other group. If it does it does and you have to do what you can to deal with it.

I don’t think individually we have a lot of control over the direction the world takes. Often people just get caught up in something like the tea party with no “intelligent” direction. You can spit into the wind but it’s like a force of nature. It doesn’t care.

There is always be a few who question what the F’ do people think they are doing. No different now then 3-4 thousand years ago.

Once in a while someone shows up with the intelligence and passion to drive the masses in a good positive direction.

If only I were King.

Sorry, it’s not me. Maybe it’s you.

I’m not exactly a fatalist however I think I recognize my limits on my ability to move the masses. Heck, maybe I’ll move myself to Canada….

I kind of believe these things happen in cycles. Another dark age around the corner. Either global warming, revolution are some other natural disaster. After that another golden age.

If maybe a matter of luck that we found ourselves in a progressive cycle.

Sorry my philosophy of history. We have such short lives to assume our times and issues are somehow unique.

As for my stuff, sure I appreciate the futility in it, but at this point in my life, after a life time of trying to understand what’s going on around me, it’s time to let it out. Will it make any difference? no. Does that mean I should blow it off? no. I want to try putting together the best essays within my ability to express what I’m thinking, feeling. Will I change the world? no. But, I like hoping that here and there perhaps I’ve touched someone, like broadcasting seeds in the desert, who knows which one might grab hold and grow into something real.

Well, that wouldn’t work because for the most part it makes some sense.
So, I kept on digging to find other stories that do support my perspective (...understanding) and put together my post.

What struck me then and what I’m mussing about this evening, far removed from WIFI, is how much of their stated notions I can agree with.
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But, the problem is, immediately next to these sensible word bites - I see glimpses of the true - dogmatic… rage driven, hubris filled, underbelly of the creature, that scares me so. The vicious posters of Obama, the books being peddled and links to nasty web sites - all reflect a movement with no interest in dialoguing, or compromise, or any sort of openness to learning anything new about the planet we are passengers on, or the world situation humanity finds itself in.

My way or the highway… or worse.

It is this angry dogmatic fueled underbelly of the thing that scares me. While I reach for words, many of them are proud to be stocking their personal armories… there is a difference.

Seems to me the extreme right wing offers dogma with no room for any growth or incorporation of new information.

I’ll start believe these guys as soon as they can acknowledge things like - the thousands of scientists and researchers and recorders of observations are every bit as genuine and honest and patriotic and dedicated as those who people USA’s armed forces!

As soon as Tea parties and other committed right wingers show a willingness to subordinate their God Fixation absolutism to the real here and now plus an attempt to honest appraise this pluralistic society our forefather’s put together. Then I might be impressed.

There is a qualitative difference! For instance you can challenge me with your thoughts and I feel compelled to look a little deeper, even allowing myself to question my presumptions, perhaps modify them, or at least appreciate them little better than before. Whereas Tea Partiers seems to reject self reflection out right.

ABSOLUTISM VS. DESIRE FOR UNDERSTANDING
There is a qualitative difference!

As I’ve mentioned in a few other posts, there seems a crowd mentality that takes over when dealing with large groups of people.

It over takes otherwise rational, reasonable individuals. Sometimes an individual can be identified that has a major influence on the group thinking, like a Glen Beck. However they don’t have any direct control. This group mentality seems to feed off itself as much as anything else.

Look at Germany, Hitler and the Nazis. This group mentality allowed insanity to result from otherwise rational intelligent human beings. Hitler is used iconicly as the leader of the Nazi but I think in some ways he was also a victim of group mentality.

This isn’t always bad, sometimes some really neat individuals will find themselves in a unique position to lead large numbers of people in positive ways. But I don’t think it is something an individual can choose. So the really smart people are just not in the right circumstances.

In a way that whole string of SPPI/Monckton emails (which still isn’t finished) feels like that situation. There was a need that wasn’t being filled and because of various circumstances I was available to get sucked into the breach. It wasn’t particularly planned, it developed organically… regardless of where its heading, or even if it’s heading anywhere.

Not that it matters, but I will vote for mostly Green Party members. My friends may continue to vote for Democrats calling them “the lesser evil,” but I will walk away from the polls knowing I voted for an atheist.

Not that it matters, but I will vote for mostly Green Party members. My friends may continue to vote for Democrats calling them “the lesser evil,” but I will walk away from the polls knowing I voted for an atheist.

Vote Rich Whitney for Governor of Illinois!

Well, I’m for the Green Party and trying to shake things up, but given how our government is made up, sometimes one just has to be pragmatic - that perhaps a vote for the third party is a vote for a very bad candidate - such as happen with Nader in 2000 - he used to be my hero but now he has just as much blood on his hands as all the rest. A vote for Nader turned out to be a vote for Bush in many places… bad, bad mistake we will never overcome or make right.

That’s why I wish voters would get more serious and realistic and involved.

If one only supports the Greens, or a third party, one day out of 730 days I think its counter productive.